Apraxia Of Speech : An Unknown Motor Issue That Affects Their Speech Communication

Ava Bracciante, an eight year-one month old female, who has been attending Lehman College Speech and Hearing Clinic since spring 2014 due to parental concerns regarding her articulation. She is currently attending the clinic once a week for 50-minute sessions. Ava’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bracciante, provided the case history report and stated that Ava received a speech-language evaluation at the Ampark School in 2014. The evaluation revealed gliding of the lingua-palatal rhotic /r/ and vocalization of the rhotic diphthong /ɚ/; her intelligibility was not compromised; therefore, she did not qualify for services. Mrs. Bracciante reported that she has seen an improvement in Ava’s speech and is an active participant to her progress.

The scope of practice of speech-language pathology describes the ethical and clinical responsibility of clinicians to implement therapy techniques, which contains efficacy that is supported by evidence. Non-speech oral-motor exercises (NSOMEs), in particular have raised controversy among speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and researchers when treating children with articulation and phonological disorders. The use of NSOMEs is a debated issue in the profession due to the lack of evidence based practice (EBP), poor clinical assumptions, and the avoidance of meeting the client’s needs.

The purpose of this evidence based research paper is to evaluate the efficacy of the cycles approach when compared to the traditional articulation therapy approach in the treatment of children who are highly unintelligible. The Cycles Phonological Remediation Approach (Hodson, 2011) is a treatment method for children with severe speech sound disorders. This approach targets phonological pattern errors in a sequential manner. During each cycle, one or more phonological patterns are targeted and after each cycle is complete, another cycle begins. Recycling of phonological patterns continues until the targeted patterns are generalized into the child’s conversational speech. The cycles approach is meant to mirror typical phonological development in children (Hodson, 2011).

Those students are always in for a long road of speech therapy as well as, problems with reading. I am interested in new research in the area because these students are typically of average intelligence but struggle in school immensely because of their disorder. According to the webinar on Childhood Apraxia of Speech, CAS is defined as a neurological childhood speech sound disorder in which the precision and consistency of movements underlying speech are impaired. The main features of the disorder consist of inconsistent errors lengthened, disrupted coarticulatory transitions, and inappropriate prosody. Motor performance is the generalization of learned behaviors while motor learning is the retention or generalization of learned behaviors. Motor learning is the problem that children with CAS encounter. Phonological awareness is important for students with CAS because they have difficulty with reading and spelling. The training of sounds can be done while also training speech sound production. A new therapy technique for CAS is using ultrasound biofeedback to establish a motor skill at the syllable or word level. The benefits of ultrasound are that the student can visually see the elevation of the tongue or retraction on hard to form sounds such as /r/. The disadvantage is that most clinicians do not have access to ultrasound at a reasonable cost to

Communication is vital in life, whether it be from simply having a conversation with someone or trying to understand what they are saying and if a person has a speech disorder, that can make life very complicated. Children with speech disorders may have trouble producing sounds to use spoken language to communicate with people and may have trouble understanding what people are trying to say. Children with speech disorders may have problems with vocal quality, articulation, fluency, hearing, and intellectual abilities. Those difficulties that children may face due to speech disorders can potentially cause setbacks in their everyday life which is why Midlands Therapy Services tries to help children reach their full potential. Midlands Therapy

We need to expand the Apraxia bubble to the parents who aren't affected by it, to the teachers who know nothing about it, and to the speech professionals who somehow do not know about it. The rewards alone in connecting the Apraxia community to the non-Apraxia community are incredible and slowly, but surely it CAN be done.

This showed the nature and degree of growth from each participant in the study. To see that Imitated speech was somewhat difficult to get from the participants, was odd because these children since being diagnosed have been getting speech therapy. The children did show effective results and hard work when it came to the number of consonants and vowels they got correct. In the AMMT session twenty -three participants improved in the twenty-five sessions they had of therapy. The trails had a high correlation, this allowed the ability of these participants to repeat correctly the distinct sounds at baseline. For the study this meant that the participants that will get the most results from AMMT will be those who can imitate speech sounds. And this seems to be because of intonation-based treatments ability to harness

Alyson Taylor is an Apraxia advocate after her personal experiences with the disorder. In the mid-ninties, she was diagnosed with Apraxia at three-years-old. There was very little known about this speech disorder and, consequently, her parents were very limited in resources and information. She attended speech therapy for thirteen years at her public school as well as a local college that offered speech therapy, California State University of Northridge (CSUN). There was such a deprivation of Apraxia knowledge that Alyson was actually CSUN’s first case study for Apraxia of Speech to help further the school’s Apraxia knowledge and treatments for future generations.

There are many different language delays and disorders found in the pediatric population. Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is one of the most common of these disorders. Dr. Libby Kumin defines CAS as “a motor speech disorder where children have difficulty planning, coordinating, producing and sequencing speech sounds” (Kumin, n.d.). Apraxia does not occur because of weakness or paralysis of facial and oral muscles. It occurs when a child’s brain cannot properly plan the movement of body parts necessary for normal speech production (“Childhood Apraxia,” 2011). Though CAS is the most common name for this specific disorder, it is also referred to as a variety of other names. Some of these names include: dyspraxia, developmental

Articulation disorders can present its way in a large array of severity. For a basic inability to pronounce word clearly to being unable to communicate intelligible to others. This disorder may be hard diagnoses and treat. When articulations issues happen it should not be taken lightly or ignored.

This study was focuses on CAS to see if biofeedback of tongue movements could help these children improve their target speech while talking. These studies have discovered that this method has improved

Developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD) is a learning disability that affects the physical co-ordination of a child because the brain is unable to process information in order to convey neural messages at full transmission (Eckersley, 2004). Dyspraxia is also known as childhood apraxia of speech and is defined as “the inability to utilize voluntary motor abilities effectively in all aspects of life from play to structure skilled tasks (Bowens, Smith, 1999). This disability often occurs in childhood and progresses to adulthood. Although it is not curable, treatment plans have been developed over the years in order to improve the way a child is able to communicate and comprehend reading material.

Speech sounds that require pressure, such as stops, fricatives, and affricates, are most affected by CLP. Articulation deficits are caused by the abnormalities of the oronasal and orofacial structure and function and by the learned neuromotor compensatory strategies learned through growth and development (Nagarajan et al., 2009). Types of errors in speech caused by a cleft are classified as either obligatory or compensatory. Obligatory are characterized by structural abnormalities that alter the manner of articulation. These abnormalities, such as an oronasal fistula or misaligned teeth, cannot be corrected through speech therapy until the structural problem is remedied. Compensatory errors, on the other hand, can be targeted and improved through speech therapy. The individual with the CLP learns the compensatory errors in development by incorrectly adapting the articulatory placement of speech sounds to compensate for their structural abnormalities (Nagarajan et al., 2009). For example, the individual may produce /p/ more posteriorly like /k/ because the cleft lip does not allow for lip closure or the correct production of

Apraxia of speech is a Motor Speech Disorder that impacts an individual’s ability to make the plans and preparations necessary to produce speech. Apraxia of speech causes an individual to have difficulty speaking when they want to or are asked to, and also causes the production of words to vary each time the speaker says them. Having this disorder does not impact the individual’s ability to comprehend speech and a person with apraxia of speech knows the message they want to communicate, but they experience a breakdown in trying to formulate and articulate that message properly. In adults this is generally referred to as acquired apraxia of speech, and can be caused by a traumatic brain injury, stroke or some other form of injury to the brain.

Alex was diagnosed with Audio Processing Disorder, or APD, when he was nine months old. When the mother had been informed of this it had involved a meeting with both social workers and military approved doctors to discuss Alex’s and his mother’s options. APD is often defined as difficulties in hearing and understanding speech with peripheral hearing. Many children with APD often find themselves confused during conversations, are unsure of what is being communicated to them and have difficulties with rapid or degraded speech (Yalçinkaya & Keith, 2008).